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The worst part is when this fake sincerity with no interest in actually helping creeps its way into smaller companies and startups. For example, I'd been using

The worst part is when this fake sincerity with no interest in actually helping creeps its way into smaller companies and startups. For example, I'd been using Wunderlist for a long time and was a very happy user. They don't charge money, but I would have gladly paid whatever they asked. Then one day I woke up and found all my tasks were gone! Well that's what I thought at first. I soon realized they weren't gone, they had just all been removed from their respective categorized lists. I filed a ticket [1], and then emailed them when I received no response. After several back-and-forth exchanges with their support, the answer I received was, sorry, we cannot restore your lists to any previous state and we don't know why it happened, all you can do is manually move them all back to their lists. All 1022 tasks. By hand. With no explanation or guarantee that it won't just randomly happen again at any point in time. And then they tack on their "apologies for the trouble". Absolutely astounding. Not to mention, their response that they "can't move tasks from one list to another", or that it's not possible for them to restore my data to a previous state, is either a lie and a complacency, or it's extremely concerning in that they don't apparently have backups of data. So yeah, my point is, when large companies do it, I somewhat expect it as part of their economies of scale; at least it's not personal (which could be a good and bad thing). When a small company does it, it feels almost like a betrayal. EDIT: Got so caught up I forgot to mention my actual point. [1] http://support.wunderlist.com/customer/en/portal/questions/989352-all-tasks-for-a-list-got-moved-to-inbox-including-completed-?new=989352 http://support.wunderlist.com/customer/en/portal/questions/9...

dasil003 13y ago
Having backups and being economically able to restore an arbitrary chunk of them for a single customer are not necessarily the same thing.
- pekk 13y ago
  Whose responsibility was it that it needed to be done at all?
  - dasil003 13y ago
    Insufficient information to answer that question.
    - dasil003 13y ago
      Nice driveby down vote but I stand by my point. It's not always the company's fault when data is "lost".
- JangoSteve 13y ago
  Normally I would agree. But when your product corrupts an arbitrary chunk of data for a single customer, then your backups need to have the ability to restore that chunk of data your product corrupted. EDIT: I would also clarify that this wasn't a case of "oops, I messed up my data, can you please help me get it back?" This was a case of, I logged in one morning and all my data was gone. It's apparently a known issue as their support system is flooded with users who have the same problem (except for most of them logging out and back in fixes it, for me it didn't).
deleted 13y ago
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fmavituna 13y ago
Agreed, it's a shame. Similar thing happened to us, someone spammed our Zendesk support desk (and we pay them quite a lot money) and created lots of tickets. Their support didn't care (not to mention they didn't have built-in flood protection, even a basic one), we have to deal with the mess in our side.
- monkeyspaw 13y ago
  That sucks. But if the LTR of a customer < employee time to fix by a large margin, it becomes more rational.
  - fmavituna 13y ago
    There are multiple ways to run a business. When a customer needs extra hand you can either say "suck it, you don't worth it" or you can say "you know what, I'll take that extra mile for you" (especially if it's because of a shortcoming of the product). It depends what kind of business you want to built.
monkeyspaw 13y ago
It's kind of a "no explicit or implicit warranty provided" situation, is it not? I wonder if there is a business model in them saying something like, "We can do this if you pay us $20". They could continue to give away the product, and charge for service/support. They obviously don't think it's worth their time/effort to look into one person's situation. That's awful for you. At the same time, maybe that's part of the reason they don't charge -- they want to build software, not support it.
- JangoSteve 13y ago
  That would be great if they at least offerred. On the other hand, it would lend itself to a business model that discourages them from fixing bugs in their product which randomly corrupt data, since they would make money any time that happens.

dasil003 13y ago

Having backups and being economically able to restore an arbitrary chunk of them for a single customer are not necessarily the same thing.

pekk 13y ago
Whose responsibility was it that it needed to be done at all?
- dasil003 13y ago
  Insufficient information to answer that question.
  - dasil003 13y ago
    Nice driveby down vote but I stand by my point. It's not always the company's fault when data is "lost".
JangoSteve 13y ago
Normally I would agree. But when your product corrupts an arbitrary chunk of data for a single customer, then your backups need to have the ability to restore that chunk of data your product corrupted. EDIT: I would also clarify that this wasn't a case of "oops, I messed up my data, can you please help me get it back?" This was a case of, I logged in one morning and all my data was gone. It's apparently a known issue as their support system is flooded with users who have the same problem (except for most of them logging out and back in fixes it, for me it didn't).

deleted 13y ago

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fmavituna 13y ago

Agreed, it's a shame. Similar thing happened to us, someone spammed our Zendesk support desk (and we pay them quite a lot money) and created lots of tickets. Their support didn't care (not to mention they didn't have built-in flood protection, even a basic one), we have to deal with the mess in our side.

monkeyspaw 13y ago
That sucks. But if the LTR of a customer < employee time to fix by a large margin, it becomes more rational.
- fmavituna 13y ago
  There are multiple ways to run a business. When a customer needs extra hand you can either say "suck it, you don't worth it" or you can say "you know what, I'll take that extra mile for you" (especially if it's because of a shortcoming of the product). It depends what kind of business you want to built.

monkeyspaw 13y ago

It's kind of a "no explicit or implicit warranty provided" situation, is it not? I wonder if there is a business model in them saying something like, "We can do this if you pay us $20". They could continue to give away the product, and charge for service/support. They obviously don't think it's worth their time/effort to look into one person's situation. That's awful for you. At the same time, maybe that's part of the reason they don't charge -- they want to build software, not support it.

JangoSteve 13y ago
That would be great if they at least offerred. On the other hand, it would lend itself to a business model that discourages them from fixing bugs in their product which randomly corrupt data, since they would make money any time that happens.